Our culture is fond of creating virtual realities (make-believe worlds) and then spending much of our time in these alternative worlds. In fact, modernity itself is a type of virtual reality, in that it cannot be a long-lasting way of living on the planet: a temporary retreat from a deeper, broader, and more ancient reality.
In the context of virtual realities, this post compares loathsome modernity to loathsome video games, and the mental miscues they share in common. While brought up on video games and modernity, I have developed allergic reactions to both, and only now made the connection. It’s a single root cause.
Both modernity and video games offer addictive rewards that prove to be empty where it really counts. We can do better.
My Video Game History
Despite their popularity—even perhaps among some of my readers—video games strike me as a waste of more than just time. Before writing me off as a typical cranky Boomer, I’m a solid Gen-Xer (1970) who witnessed and excitedly embraced the introduction of video games to the world—even programming some of my own on a Commodore 64.
I was right there at the beginning: an early-adopter. As a kid, we had (and often played) the first commercially successful video game console (Pong). Video game arcades burst onto the scene when I was about ten years old, introducing us to Pac-Man, Asteroids, Defender, Centipede, and many more. I played all of them, going through an embarrassing multitude of quarters (I wasn’t particularly good at them). Joust was a favorite—probably because of the less-constrained richness of flying/flapping through a 2-D space with obstacles. One Christmas during this craze, I got the Intellivision console. I was so obsessed and eager that in the months leading up I cobbled together—in cargo-cult fashion—a home-made controller paddle out of cardboard and colored by crayon. It sported a spring-loaded directional disk, and even made realistic tactile clicks when pressing the buttons due to some unintentional feature of the way I folded tape in small loops to make a double-stick surface underneath the “keypad.” In my first quarter at Georgia Tech, I probably spent more time in a dorm room down the hall playing Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers than I did on classwork. Tetris also gobbled loads of time and invaded my dreams.
So, I’ve been there. While video games were not a large part of my life after age 20—I think in large part because I was finding greater fulfillment elsewhere—my breaking point didn’t come until about ten years later while playing the game of Myst. My wife and I were playing it together, and doing pretty well at unlocking clues and exploring the various visually-rich worlds. But I suddenly had an epiphany: I was just finding artificial and arbitrary breadcrumbs left by some (other) nerd. It all seemed rather empty.
Fake Skills
Once when visiting family, an eleven-year-old excitedly informed me that she had become really good at bowling. I was impressed. That’s a real-world game requiring mastery of attentiveness and many motor skills. Then I found out she was talking about a Wii game. So the computer liked the way the accelerometers were moved, which isn’t nothing, but a lot of the real elements were totally missing: imperfect shoes and floor making grabby spots; a honking big weight off to one side, straining various muscles; too much or too little friction between fingers and holes that are never sized perfectly; thumb soreness after a few games; the full dynamics of pins whirling around; the occasional teetering pin. The list goes on. The wrist motion sensed by accelerometers is the palest shadow of the real thing.
Video games fill in a lot of the fizix (fake physics) in order to steer results into “interesting” (intended) territory. All the user does is supply the merest suggestion of intent, and the computer does the rest. Granted, timing of button presses can make the difference between hitting your target and not, but it’s seldom more than a single-parameter filter, while the real world unavoidably executes many in parallel.
The virtual reality of video games inverts/perverts the relative probability of something going “right” (as intended) vs. going sideways. Put an eight-year-old behind the “wheel” of a formula-one racing car, and chances are they’ll not only make it to the finish line alive, but in respectable time. No number of collisions with the walls or other cars result in fiery death, debilitating damage to the car, or lawsuits. That’s fizix, and for many people it’s more entertaining (more fun) then reality. A crushing blow (or even many) from a sword might reduce strength points, rather than leaving an arm on the floor and its previous owner bleeding out, not to mention psychological trauma. Movies and television shows also bend the rules far beyond the breaking point, to increasingly absurd levels.
Impoverished Worlds
My poor friends. I love them dearly, but when they finally succeed in getting me to pick up the controller, nobody has any fun. I’m busy trying to understand the rules of the fake world. I’m a robot wandering around. Can I fall off this catwalk? No. If I run at this wall, do I get knocked down? No. Can I shoot my own leg with my laser blaster? No. The guard rails are extreme, and I feel like I’m wrapped in thirty layers of bubble-wrap and diapers. Yet, I did once manage to get tangled up in scaffolding or something where no button presses—even by my baffled friends—could wiggle me free. But in general, it’s such a pared-down fake world with almost none of the richness and complexity of our magnificent real world. It’s a world stripped of unintended consequences, providing only a tiny parameter space of the designer’s limited vision and capability. It seems people (i.e., their brains) have been conditioned by our culture to be attracted to these depleted, dumbed-down worlds.
Similar statements can be made about games like Dungeons and Dragons. The menu of possibilities may be more impressively open than in video games, which themselves are more open than scripted forms of virtual-reality entertainment (movies, television, plays). But the world that is invoked is still extremely tidy and limited to what pops into the meat-brains of the master and players. Sure, randomness is thrown in to grant or thwart success. But notice how the game tends to go on, not straying terribly far from what the design prescribes. Half or all the characters aren’t wiped out by a sudden unexpected avalanche, a falling stone from the wizard’s blast, virulent disease, a wild boar out of nowhere, etc. Serious guard rails. A pampered “life.”
I’ve never been attracted to D&D, which broke out when I was in sixth-grade. Many of my friends played it, and I tried a few times, but it just could never hold my interest. I now have more insight as to why.
Worthy Entertainment
If this train of thought was taken to its logical extreme, I would not enjoy any game, movie, or story. That’s not the case at all. I can most easily get on board with games requiring physical skill and contending with uncontrollable elements. Darts, billiards, bowling, archery, and golf come to mind—though I don’t spend much time on any of these.
It occurs to me that a good example is Bocce. I have a bocce set (8 balls and a pallino) that weighs in at 13 kg (29 lbs). I absolutely love playing it with friends. On its carrying-case is a drawing of a dimensioned Bocce court. Yeah, maybe if I had a stick up my… Who needs a confined, rectilinear court, when the whole world is out there, waiting to be explored? The beach is great: lots of variety from soft sand to hard sand, with a challenging slope and the danger of losing the heavy balls in the waves. Many back yards offer obstacles, hazards, bounce opportunities, various textures and speeds. We’ve played “extreme mountain bocce” (rocks, shrubs, all sorts of surfaces). Forests work; parks; campgrounds. And in all cases, my friends and I play with the rule that the winner of the last round gets to toss the pallino and establish whatever rules they want. Many rounds are pretty straightforward, letting the varied terrain supply the creative angle, but twists are not rare. Maybe eyes closed. Maybe backwards over the head. Sub-dominant hand, through the legs. Maybe you’re all in a circle with the pallino somewhere in the middle (hint: it won’t stay there!). It’s sort-of like Calvinball, and hundreds of inventive twists have been tried. While it’s still constrained by rules, those rules (and the external environment) can vary all over the place and lead to unpredictable results. Keeping score is secondary, and we usually loose track—it’s hard when laughing hysterically. The fun is in the playing and in the creativity and in the wild interactions. The bocce purists can keep their tidy, rigid courts.
In terms of on-screen entertainment, I tend to gravitate to productions that edge toward unpredictable, messy, complex, non-formulaic patterns. They feel more like the world I live in, and therefore seem to be capable of teaching me something. If the “creative talent” behind a show can’t capture this realistic feel, I am skeptical I can learn anything from the artificial world and shallow relationships they construct.
When the real world is allowed to write the script, the result tends to be far more rich and believable. And fewer cars explode. I have a standard. Any story that is more incredible than that of Shackleton’s Endurance saga is, well, not credible. Another extreme is painted by the 117 Days Adrift story.
This isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy entertainment that requires suspension of disbelief. Some of my favorite movies and shows are outright goofy (but share in common unexpected twists and unintended consequences, like real life).
Modernity’s Turn
Just as in video games, I would say modernity creates a similarly impoverished virtual reality. It’s a make-believe world wherein all the focus is on a narrow set of intended consequences, pretending the far-more-numerous and mounting unintended consequences either don’t exist or can be tamed by the same techniques that concentrate only on intended results. When will we learn? It’s a form of built-in mental incapacity (of every human), and not a surprising one or a curable one. Our brains are simply not up to the task. The best we can do is recognize this truth and limit its damages, via a culture of deliberate restraint.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t use our brains. That can’t be stopped, anyway. Our brains are marvelously well-adapted to some tasks. But we run into trouble when we use our brains to conjure a virtual reality (modernity) divorced from ecological complexity and the time-tested ways of the community of life.
Modernity—whose definition I extend to the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago—differs radically from ecological practices that have been vetted by evolution to work in the intermediate-to-long term. Modernity is more an amalgam of “look what we can do” stunts of both accidental and cerebral origin. Brains have never taken the wheel to this extent in the more-than-human world, and that fact alone puts us on shaky ground. Like a video game, modernity piles on one artificial (not vetted by evolution/ecology) construct after another—reminiscent of plate spinning—in pursuit of some narrow goal while ignoring a nearly infinite raft of real-world context.
Video games get away with it because they’re isolated from the real world in a small, closed system. They create a sort of fantasy safe-space where the possible outcomes are narrowed to a graspable set. Importantly, video games are constructed to make it possible to “win” if everything is executed well. Some players “win” by employing “hacks,” and this reward strategy is carried over into “life hacks” as if real life, too, is a game to be manipulated.
We pretend that modernity is winnable if we play the game just right, but it truly is not. This belief requires ignorance of ecological context and a sense of “safe space” separation from the community of life. Life carries no such guarantees, and modernity is on its face not constructed to win in the long run, as what looks like winning in a narrow sense turns out to be losing big-time where it counts. Modernity’s run-time is exceedingly brief on ecological timescales. In this short time, it has rapidly racked up an accumulating toll that is coming due, to the tune of a sixth mass extinction.
When a video game says “game over,” it’s as empty as the rest of the game: no consequences, and one can start over any time. The real world won’t be so forgiving when it pronounces “game over” for modernity. This sloppy and comparatively-sudden creation of the human brain is no match for life, which has spent millions—and even billions—of years patiently testing and honing a community of life that is selected to work in the long term. Modernity has no place.
Let’s Stop Pretending
Just as I walked away from the emptiness of video games decades ago, I am now advocating that we set down the controls of modernity—stop spinning the plates—recognizing it as a fool’s game that can’t be won, and whose continuance drives the irreplaceable community of life over a cliff.
Fantasies are fun, and the rewards can be intoxicating/addictive. But it’s time that we grow up and stop playing the empty, escapist game of modernity: we need to learn to live in the real world again.
Views: 2495
Good timing on this one, Tom. I’m two years younger than you, and grew up in the same computing milieu. Lately I’ve been idly looking at used gaming computers on craigslist because the present chaos in America has me craving the hackable, predictable bubble-wrap satisfactions that video games used to provide. I know it would be a bad idea–digital Valhallas are addictive to me–but it doesn’t stop the wanting. You’ve stiffened my resolve, and for that I thank you.
I curse modernity for stunting us in this fashion; training our brains from infancy to make optimizing Mumford’s megamachine our greatest pleasure, and rendering our animal natures nigh-unreachable. I hope that some homo sapiens survive what is coming, and are able to find their place again.
Glad to save you in the nick of time! Stunted is a good term. Infantilized is another.
I cobbled together this quote from things two different people said, and your essay here reminded me of it:
"Civilization is what you need to deliver false promises and lies without immediately dying. It is the ability to be stupidly detached from reality, yet manage to temporarily avoid the consequences."
Your description of bowling — so great! Took me right there!
Hi Tom, I’m 25 years younger than you and grew up addicted to video games. You’ve perfectly encapsulated why they’re a problem and why so many people who spend a lot of time with them (especially in their youth) become stunted and have to put in extra work to overcome the deficit.
I know you’re not a fan of the term philosophy, and I know you're keen to deemphasize the worship of the human brain, but you really have turned into (or always were) a great philosopher/thinker.
Actually, because I can already sense you’ll be cringing when you read those words, let me say it this way with words I think you’ll enjoy: you’re great observer. I don’t know you from your scientific career, but I’m sure you were back then, and now you’ve broadened your scope, become a great observer of life, and noted many of the problems with modernity.
I guess computer games provide the brain with just the right amount of interest, challenge and pleasure to become addictive and in a dysfunctional world – provides more than enough escapism to facilitate a robust sense of denial.
An acquaintance who amassed a small fortune in his twenties, dropped out of circulation when he acquired a top-end computing VR games system (over $500K of equipment and software) and rarely left his house. Within five years he was obese and had developed some serious mental health issues from his other addictions to amphetamine and cocaine.
He could be doing so much more – good, rewarding activities – but is unable to break out the cycle.
We all have addictive traits. We get fixated on work, money, games, drugs to the point that “everything in moderation” becomes totally redundant.
I play guitar. I’m still learning after nearly 60 years of practise but can now play quite complex pieces – classical, jazz and fingerstyle – and love the challenges that learning or creating new arrangements pose. I play most days for several hours – so just as much as the bloke on his computer – and I have to accept that I do so for much the same reasons as he does, plus I find it meditative. It also gives me access to a wonderful community of musicians who can wile away the hours creating much enjoyment for ourselves and those who come to listen.
Yes, we can all do better. But whilst it’s easy to be critical, one should also acknowledge that individuals like my gamer friend – have a far lower carbon footprint than those ‘fortunate’ few also holding a small fortune who choose to “travel the world” and spend, spend, spend on all the materialistic treats on offer.
Finding the right balance is the key. Everything and anything in moderation, as my grandmother used to say…
I very much appreciate and relate to your posting today.
I know and have experienced just enough of the virtual reality world to recognize and identify with your observations and take-aways and most of your references. I especially appreciate your bowling observations :-). I'm near 70 and one of my three children (in his mid 30s) still loves video games. Perhaps because I was raised without regular access to TV (until my mid teens), I have never been drawn into the allure of virtual reality. I would include social media in this category. I have come to be gratefeful, especially in the last several years, that for whatever reason, I'm increasingly drawn more to the natural world than the virtual one.
My observations in my little corner of the world, are that more and more of my contacts – across all ages – are becoming more aware of this predicament and disconnect and appear to be purposeful in their use of time and resources. Unfortunately I think this applies perhaps less with my boomer cohorts :-(. I m learning that the more I can be part of encouraging and providing and participating in this transition, the more hopeful and engaged I am.
Thank you!
Good point about social media setting up an alternate reality. Yes: very much a showcased, strongly biased projection of life that isn't very representative. Notice that people post pictures of their fancy meal on a plate: never of the half-masticated food in their open mouths, or what becomes of it before flushing. 99% of peoples' realities don't make the cut for the virtual version. I've never done Facebook, Twitter, etc. either.
I thought this interesting and connected
https://theconversation.com/the-infantilization-of-western-culture-99556
"But it’s time that we grow up and stop playing the empty, escapist game of modernity: we need to learn to live in the real world again."
Billions of people depend on modernity for their very lives; they can't stop playing, but playing won't save them in the end. Those few who survive the collapse of modernity will either live in the real world or, if they don't, humans will go extinct.
Neither of these outcomes are of great importance in the long run, but I like the aesthetics of having indigenous cultures (which is all there will be) survive for a while more after modernity goes away. After all, humans are a product of evolution, too, and some off what they do is glorious.
I should clarify that I don't expect a sudden halt; done within a week, a year, or my lifetime. Ideally, the cessation will transpire over generations, but we need to start stopping, is all. By the time we're done, it need not be billions of helpless dependents on a failing system. And that reduction doesn't *have* to be by catastrophic means (could be simple demographic fade-out as low fertility undercuts population).
I'm with you on favoring a continuation of the species in "right relationship" to the ecological community of life—as like all life we do indeed possess some glorious qualities.
Hi Tom, I appreciate the perspective and have certainly experienced the addictive qualities of video games and other media. I do think serialized television shows occupy much more of the cognitive time for humans than video games. Few of my peers play games regularly, but a huge percentage watch show after show, and little of the content can be remembered a few months later. I found Joshua Schrei's analysis of the developmental/evolutionary need these addictions are fulfilling very salient in his episode "How Trance States Shape the World" https://open.spotify.com/episode/4a37QVzTox2PQ9Rqh4YABO?si=2P4gmU-dSC-dMwGqsKIE3A
I've read somewhere that TOT was DESIGNED to be addictive. (Like nicotine in cigarettes?) More generally, advertisers NEED such an affect. Without it, there too little halo (another cognitive flaw) develops around the main characters, which they need for their commercial placement to work as intended…
So well written. Thank you.
My despair deepens as the great unraveling or great simplification picks up speed.
Everywhere I look there is an overwhelming emptiness to our existence.
We are so debased that we watch the play out of Gaza and Ukraine and Sudan etc etc etc.
Not to mention the world of nature and our fellow biology.
Many people say, those few of us who recognize our path must present a joyous struggle. That our approach is wrong. We will turn off people if we do not smile and present happy struggle and warnings.
Well, I like James Baldwin, cannot find any joy in humanity as a whole.
I am almost broken but I have never been a quitter so I carry on, one foot in front of another.
These may be symptoms of signing up for the wrong team. The emptiness, debasement, and conflation of humanity with modernity. Imagine a teenager in 1943 Germany, having been an enthusiastic Hitler Youth, becoming dimly aware of the atrocities and being unable to remain supportive—despite being surrounded by a culture of enthusiasm. But there is another way. So it is with modernity. We can (eventually) replace its emptiness and debasement with something that feels more right. At least we can get started down that path.
I was born in 1995, so I was brought into a much more diverse and computationaly complex virtual world (with online gaming becoming mainstream by the mid-late 00s) and I also ended up getting bored of it, particularly after observing that the vast majority of players ends up gravitating around the same "overpowered" setup, this is that that maximizes the performance (something most players find rewarding) in a virtual world devoid of any workarounds due to its inherent constraints. You need devs to change the weights on damage/speed or all sorts of limited parameters after an update to change the metagame for players to organically ending up finding the next "overpowered" setup…
I was just thinking a few days ago about my childhood preoccupation with video games (I kept a diary for a couple weeks in 1989 and all it documents is my Nintendo-related triumphs, losses and Zelda erasures) so this was timely for me as well. I was musing more on the psychological impact of the typical video game story – to use Super Mario as an example, that you're on this individualistic hero's quest (only YOU can save the princess), the world is filled with malicious plants and animals who are all agents of evil giant dragons and out to get you at every turn, collecting coins gets you extra points and lives, you can cheat the system and skip ahead if you're clever, and the occasional consumption of a magic mushroom or plant gives you superpowers to advance your journey. It's like a recipe to create a narcissist tech bro, no? But let's flip the script – maybe those ghosts in Pac-Man were sick of you mindlessly eating everything on the screen and not leaving one bit for anyone else, and are totally justified in chasing you down, and it'd be a good thing if you lose! 🙂
When I started spending more time outdoors as an adult, I was apprehensive at first, and it took me some time to realize that (what little) nonhuman life I encountered was not really interested in me and/or would prefer to avoid me. The birds and the bees were just going about their business, and the only animal that was going to come after me was an unleashed dog. But I did have to wonder if those many, many hours fending off malevolent turtles and fireball-spitting flowers had warped the ol' meat brain. It took a looooong time to get to the point where I'd rather watch insects than Netflix!
Of course, if there was a game that could help us imagine our way out of modernity (instead of indoctrinating players in it), maybe I'd feel a little more open-minded…
Awesome comment! And yes, when put like that Mario et al. seem diabolical! I love your take on the Pac-Man ghosts. Maybe a 4-player cooperative game where the goal is be the ghosts and stop the insatiable rampage!
Good observations on the non-human non-preoccupation with all things human. That's a sort of wisdom.
Thanks!! 😊 And I would happily play a Team Ghost variation of Pac-Man. Maybe an aspiring developer can revamp them all. The egalitarian version of SimCity, SimCircle!
In the meantime, I'm gonna dust off my bowling ball and start frequenting the alley down the road again. This post reminded me how much fun it was (if a bit harder on aging thumbs)
How could we scale down in a human way? Less suffering for planet and humans. People have stopped having kids (as you are explaining).
I'm of a similar "vintage" to you Tom.
My first computer was a ZX Spectrum.
Playing computer games was an exciting novelty at first. All felt very "new/modern". But I soon got bored with them.
In fact, I got bored with computers, full stop.
(It was another 15 years before I owned another one)
The idea of programming, operating systems, hardware and software just turned me cold.
It all still does. I resent the intrusion of it all to every aspect of my life.
It's always seemed detached from reality, (or a very human made reality.)
All possible because of the "carbon pulse" and soon to disappear again.
You could be describing office jobs when you talk about virtual reality, and computer games. I work in IT, and in finance (systems accounting, and all other business systems stuff). Processes that exist for, and of, the system itself. They serve no physical purpose, other than an administering of the system. When you notice it, it is impossible to unnotice. Nothing I do, or did, holds any real purpose at all, it is entirely abstract. I've tried to explain to colleagues, and they either look at me blankly, or we go through the levels of explanation until they are bored (about ten seconds on average!):
"Well, if it wasn't for me, the bills won't get paid!",
"but why is there a bill?", or "what is a bill?".
"Well if we didn't have bills then we wouldn't get the materials?".
"But the materials are there, in the woods, you can just go and get them"
"But the guy who owns the woods will need to be paid"
"But why does anyone own woods? How does someone own woods?"
and so on. Of course I sound like an idiot, but the point that they won't engage with, is that all these things are abstractions of the system itself, they are not real things. "It's just the way it is" quickly ends the conversation.
Then there's the physical boundary. I live in a small village, with a beautiful view of the sea. All around are fields – complete domination – with not a tree between them. I speak to the farmers (some are family, some friends), and they don't see it. They don't see the desert that they've created, juxtaposed with nature's cliffs, waves and giant granite rocks. The scale of the annhilation of nature is breathtaking when you know its there. When you know that monocrop fields are not nature, and domesticated cows are not nature, and your pet [bleeped] dog bothering the sheep is not [bleeped] nature!
Pets. That's a deep subject. Is it one you've covered previously? There's something virtual about our relationship with animals that is illustrated in our pets. I can't articulate it. I expect you could!
Anyway, that's my rant for the day, thanks for a lovely piece of writing
Agreed about the artificiality of modernity—based on flags and papers. I think of the American Pledge of Allegiance as: I pledge allegiance, to the symbol of a symbolic fiction, and to the idea upon which it floats, one notion, under an imagined deity, declared indivisible, with ideals and fictions for select humans.
As for pets or domesticated animals, I know I've touched on it but would have to dig to find out where. My criterion is: are they free to leave? Would they stay without doors, cages, fences, herding, etc.? Can they feed themselves, or is their food under our control? Most of the time, it's clear they are dependent slaves. Yes, selective (controlled) breeding may have produced animals incapable of wild survival, but whose fault is that? If human slaves had likewise been in captivity long enough to be bred for certain tasks, they, too, may become non-viable as free individuals. But surely that would not make it all okay to keep them in captivity. Most of our "pets" would choose to wander off. Dogs may be an exception, as they have co-evolved (by their own initial choice) to live with humans in a full ecological context.
Thanks for your reply. Being in the UK, I've always found the whole pledge of allegiance thing a little sinister. Then I remember that we have a king and queen!
In my human centric view, I wasn't thinking from the perspective of the pet. I was more concerned about the meaning of pets, to humans. Do they substitute (terribly) for our separation from nature? I've had pets in the past, and know plenty of people that have them. In my case, it was likely an immature desire to "own" an animal, with my ego joining in to celebrate the owning of the cat commodity. In others, it's a mixture of ego (the rise of the fashion-dog, and trends in different breeds), immaturity and seeking to fill a void. It seems to me that there is no greater light bulb to illuminate that something huge is missing from our lives, than pet "ownership". Maybe I'm overstating it!
Ah—yes—that's a whole other angle, and one I have witnessed in others. They *want* the cute/furry wild animal for themselves, to have and keep. Maybe they think it will adore them back? Since I see it as bondage, I'm appalled. Could be about control, ownership, neediness, a combination, or other elements as well.
Tom has uncharacteristically left the comments turned on! This is my chance to say how much I enjoy reading his thought-provoking essays, and how thankful I am that he writes them.
The evanescence of modernity (and by extension the meaninglessness of the material things we strive for, often at terrible cost to the natural world) really makes one think about life and about what it means to be a good person.
Ha! By default, comments stay open 10.0 days, so you're easily still in the window. I'm glad you made it, and that you get something out of the content!
Tom, my apologies for coming late to this post; I am catching up.
Allow me to share some experience that relates well to this post me-thinks. Some years ago we had an au-pair, a very clever young man in a phase searching for what he wants to do in his life. Unfortunately, he spent all his spare time in his room playing video games despite being in Cambridge, UK, where he could have made use of all there is on offer. As it happens, in a newspaper I found a very relevant article entitled: "Wining games, loosing lives" which explained that a lot of young people prefer living in the basement of their parents house playing video games rather than going out into the world. The explanation was that a video game (through its physics engine and behavior models with a limited set of parameters, reductionist by nature) allows them to win, to feel rewarded, while the world outside is complex. They feel secure in this made-up world.
That said, perhaps modernity we all seem to be clinging on to offers similar comfort; rather than "going out there" we prefer the "safe" world of "grown-ups", economy, money, growth, etc.